A good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun. That, and the fact that the bad guy embarrassed all the “journalists” who had just spent weeks trying to whip up a public furor against Chick-fil-A, meant they had to pretend it didn’t happen.

A Virginia man pleaded guilty Wednesday to wounding a security guard at the Washington headquarters of a conservative Christian lobbying group, a shooting that made headlines in part because the man was carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches.

Floyd Corkins II, 28, acknowledged in a plea agreement that he intended to kill as many people as possible during the August shooting at the Family Research Council. He also planned to target other organizations that oppose gay marriage if he wasn’t stopped.

Corkins intended to smear the sandwiches in the faces of his victims to make a statement about gay rights opponents, he acknowledged during a hearing Wednesday. Chick-fil-A was making headlines at the time because of its president’s stated opposition to gay marriage.

But hey, who cares? Political speech only creates an “atmosphere of violence” when it can be pinned on conservatives. Crazy guys who hurt people for political reasons are only considered news when there’s some way to blame it on the Tea Party.

Suddenly I’m hungry for some Chick-fil-A. I promise not to let it go to waste like this idiot.

Update: John Sexton notes that Corkins picked his targets, of which the FRC was to be just the first, from the Southern Poverty Law Center website: “It’s impossible not to notice that this is precisely what many on the left accused Sarah Palin of doing in January 2011 after Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords and several bystanders in a Tucson parking lot. At the time, the left claimed Palin’s district map featuring crosshairs might have given Loughner ideas. No connection between the map and the shooting was ever found. Indeed, it turned out Loughner had been obsessed with Giffords before Palin’s map even existed.” Yeah, but this is different because shut up.

SPLC spox: “We are not commenting” on revelations that the FRC shooter used info on SPLC’s website to pick his target.